4601

I’m not too impressed with the first half of Sulla’s article. A lot of griping about trivial crap, and some outright misinformation.

He first starts making valid points when he gets to global unhappiness. He’s exactly right about that. Civ IV’s curb for rapid expansion is much, much better than the systems in I-III, and V abandons it for no good reason.

He’s right about road upkeep, though for the wrong reasons. He’s also right about building upkeep. Sorenson had the brilliant idea that if you wanted the game to emphasize building a few, heavily improved cities, upkeep should be per city rather than per building. Civ V abandons that insight, again for no good reason. That didn’t surprise me, since BTS had that awful upkeep for corporations that completely broke the game’s upkeep model, and it’s the same lead designer.

He’s right about diplomacy.

I don’t care if he’s right about multiplayer. The Civ series has always been first and foremost about single player play. It’s rather inherent in the design of a game which takes a long time to play, both on a per-turn and a per-game basis. As usual, people who do play it multiplayer have a grossly exaggerated idea of how important it is in the grand scheme of things.

The analysis of 1 unit per tile is completely off in just about every way. Sulla and the guy he quotes seem to forget that Civ I and II were effectively one unit per tile. Sure, you could stack units, but you lost everything in the tile if you lost on defense, so in practice it was at most 2 units per tile: a defensive unit like pikes and an offensive unit. Except in cities, of course, but even there it was rare to see more than 3 units. Due to the primitive approach to combat, 2 units per tile was uncommon - usually it was a sea of the best fast units, i.e. horsemen, knights, or tanks.

So absolutely everything he says about what you “must” do to the economic system in order to make 1 unit per tile work is balderdash. Civ Revolution is effectively 2 units per tile (1 defensive, 1 offense) and the game is very aggressive in terms of tile production and building production bonuses. Granted, it’s got that odd mechanic of building armies out of 3 regular units, but you simply cannot play safely with the massive stacks which were common in III and IV.

The one and only valid point he makes about 1 unit per tile is the obvious one: the Civ V AI is really bad at it, and there have been plenty of games that have managed it in the past.

4602

You’re always going to have people, once a game is “perfected”, who aren’t going to like change. Sometimes they’re wrong, but other times they’re right.
I’ve seen this from several communities- from games as diverse as Street Fighter to Kohan. Usually it happens when grognards feel like they’ve been ignored or marginalized, and usually it’s fatal for the game involved.

4603

Then you’re already talking from an extreme powergamer point of view, much like Sulla (see above: playing on Immortal!). I rarely ever have enough gold to buy even one unit… city state bribes and research agreements tend to consume any surplus I have.

Fundamentally the game just doesn’t feel epic in nature when you’ve got more pieces on chess board than in your whole army.

But how is that worse than Civ4 where you had usually just a single piece on the board, namely the killer stack?

So actually I find myself considering should I build a road to increase my military capabilities in a border cities or save money. It is a modestly interesting trade off but hardly strategic in nature.

Actually, that sounds as strategic as any decision I can think of… and nicely realistic, too.

You don’t hear a lot (any?) of people saying they like Starcraft 1 better than 2.

Sure, but that’s because Starcraft 2 was deliberately designed as a graphics upgrade with only minor gameplay tweaks, and Civ5 is deliberately designed as a complete overhaul of the series. I wouldn’t want every sequel to be like SC2 – that would be boring!

The AI is really decent enough now IMO. I don’t understand why ICS is a problem at all, honestly, not even in the release version. It’s only a problem if you must play that way or lose the game, as in earlier iterations where quickly spamming cities all over the place was mandatory. But that’s absolutely not the case in Civ5, you can win just fine with moderately sized empires and well-developed cities. This sounds like one of those “it hurts when I hit myself with a hammer” complaints – why are using ICS if you don’t like it?

cities fall relatively too easily without stacks of defenders in them

Well, you have to counter a siege with a field army, not just park a defender stack in the city. That’s a clear improvement in my opinion.

I also have to add that it sucks how little support for the modding community Firaxis is offering. The modding tools are partly weaksauce and partly not working, the scripting is too limited and partly broken, yet they even patched out important parts because they figured no one was using them. Yeah, I know they hotpatched them back in, but still.

The only thing they briefly patched out was Lua support AFAIK. Also, what’s supposed to be wrong with the modding tools? I just made a little mod to increase minimum distance to three hexes, and I was actually impressed how well Civ5 supports modding. Instead of copying entire huge XML files you can simply specify individual values that you want to change. No more updating your mod files after every patch, and no more conflicts with other mods (that don’t change the exact same data).

And then there are useless posters who seem unable to handle context. This discussion was about an entire laundry list of complaints, and most were actually directed at design changes.

4604

Funny, considering that a completely incompetent, random and insane AI is pretty much the only thing unchanged from civ4 to civ5.

4605

My experience pre-patch was that ICS was optional, at least on the difficulties I played. Post-patch it seems necessary.

Seems contradictory, doesn’t it, considering the changes directed at curbing ICS. However, they also made cities much tougher. Pre-patch, you could simply rush with a horseman force. Post-patch, you need a huge economy to keep up with the AI bonuses on higher difficulties, since you can’t take them out early with a rush, and that large economy pretty much forces an ICS mentality.

The real issue with ICS isn’t so much that it’s attractive, it’s that building up a few cities is unattractive. The building bonuses are low, and with the bland terrain production every city is very like every other one. The most important thing isn’t good city positioning, it’s making sure you’ve got a couple of hills near every city for basic hammers.

You don’t even have to look to Civ 4 to see a better system. Any of the other games emphasizes good city placement much better. Particularly Civ Revolution, where the natural resources were such a big deal due to their massive bonuses over regular tiles.

As for the “hitting yourself with a hammer” argument in regard to higher difficulties, the game simply isn’t challenging at Prince or King. You can fart around without thinking much and outstrip the AI in research. Emperor at least makes you work for your victories.

Agreed. Cities are plenty tough post patch.

4606

I was able to steamroll the Civ5 AI in my fourth game on immortal even though I barely understood the mechanics, that sure as hell wasn’t possible in Civ 4. I don’t think you can call it insane or random unless you consider every 4x AI to be insane and random. It is far more predictable than in most other games at least.

4607

Well, I’m not using ICS, but the AI is - always, which is sort of a problem, imo. I felt that in any Civ title since Civ2, the AI was too aggressive about expansionism.

Also, I wouldn’t call the AI “decent enough” by any stretch of imagination.
It fares a bit better now than it did at release, but it’s still horrible.

rezaf

4608

You make a good point. If Firaxis wanted to emphasize few cities, they should have made the buildings extremely powerful and made sure they unlocked only after you built a preliminary building. University & Public School are good implementations; Bank and Stock exchange aren’t.

I wonder if the impression of the AI is the fact that because, post horseman-nerf, conquering is so much slower vis-a-vis Civ 4, you get to see more facepalm moments?

The fastest I ever killed a Deity Civ 4 AI was ~15 turns.

4609

A way too long post

Some kind of compromise would have been better. Right now, the game doesn’t scale well from the smallest map to the largest. Chokepoints are a wonderful tactical option, but not if most of the map itself becomes a chokepoint not due to terrain, but due to excess units. 2 or 3 units per hex to alleviate unnecessary logjams and the ability to move groups (instead of 1 at a time) would have been a very good option. Keeping 5 units for your entire game in small maps certainly doesn’t make you feel like a world conquerer, but then you go to the opposite side of the equation and moving 70 individual units per turn with constantly changing pathfinding is an annoying, tedious chore.

I also disagree in that people want “Civ 4.1” instead of “Civ V”. I wanted Civ V, and I think a few critical differences would have made it a much better game. Namely, global happiness. This mechanic is one I greatly disagree with because now each city lacks character. In most countries cities can be deeply divided based on their location, access to natural resources, how much they align with the current leaders, etc. None of this exists in Civ V. Why should a city you throw in the most miserable place on the planet… say a city in the desert with no acess to fresh water, riddled with disease, choking pollution, be as happy as a city with beautiful vistas, clean water, tons of fresh food, no disease, access to trade etc. In Civ V this area of the game is just incredibly wrong and kills the immersion factor because you know “global happiness” is just a simplified cheap mechanic.

My point is if three things had been changed:

  1. 2 units per tile
  2. Local happiness
  3. End-game replays, graphs

…the landscape of the Civ fanatic might be immensely different as the game would be more realistic. Then the addition of religion, global warming, espionage etc in further expansions would fill in the large gaps in game-play we currently have. It almost feels like some options were “change for the sake of change” as opposed to the evolution of the series. Civ V is to Civ IV as Simcity Societies is to Simcity 4. If this were called “Civ Generals” instead of knowing it was supposed to be “Civ V” many of us would have accepted the changes and differing game-play as we’d know the Civ series would still continue to evolve and become more immersive… feeling like a true Historical World Leader.

Jon Shafer was very brave to take the series and make it into the game he always wanted. I wish we knew the details of what goes on between Sid, Firaxis employees, and Take2 so Jon wouldn’t take unnessesary blame from fans. Maybe things would have been much different if they’d had 6 more months and more programmers to work on the game.

As it is, I wish Civ IV and its mods could be imported into Civ V as it’d make for a wonderful gaming experience with the gorgeous visual polish Civ V has.

4610

I sort of agree with this - they should have made a different game with this engine, one that does not try to be a game of human history and civilizations.
Many parts of Civ5 from the leader personalities over 1UPT to the emphasis on global conquest would have lended themselves for some scenario in which you conquer a “map” strictly by military force.

Oh, and about 1UPT again - it’s annoying to see stacks of doom again when you go back to Civ4, but honestly, I think the game that dealt with this in the best way was Master of Magic.
You had 9UPT, which meant you could get a varied force on any tile, but truly had to think about it’s composition. It was impossible / too expensive to field an army that was truly able to win against a determined invasion force in every city you owned, nor was it possible to field a 9 unit invasion force yourself that could efforlessly win every battle.
Well, it was sort of possible in the late game, and AI weaknesses made it easier than it should have been, but within reason, it WAS impossible.

The whole notion of 1UPT - as good as it might sound on paper - just makes little sense on a global scale when it means an archer can fire from London to Paris and artillery can reach Paris from Dublin or something.

That said, if it would work reasonably well, I wouldn’t be bothered by it too much, but imo it does not work well at all.

rezaf

4611

That review probably saved me from purchasing Civ V.

Having played the boardgame recently, its solution to stacks of doom is having a low stacking limit and forcing you to invest in increasing that. Seems like that’d be a good compromise between stacks of doom and 1UPT.

Edit: This got me to thinking. Many board games have units with large ranges (e.g. 10 hexes). Typically these are unit scale combat type games, but I’m wondering why a computer game couldn’t have a hell of a lot more smaller hexes and support faster units overall and units with ranges? Every 4x game it seems like has the same 1 or 2 hex move per turn and ranged units might have a range of 2, though more often a range of 1 (adjacent) as a bombard where the opponent can’t hit back. Seems like a bunch of issues with stacks of doom or 1UPT center around the fact the game world just isn’t granular enough in terms of hexes/squares. Is there some technical reason why computer games can’t have more hexes? Memory or performance problems? Just that the art isn’t as nice with small units?

4612

I think that you are being very rational and cogent, and I do believe a lot of the complaints do come down to a bunch of gamers who developed favorite strategies and played Civ IV over and over again in a zen like state. Many of them do seem unable to evaluate Civ V on its own, as opposed to essentially complaining that they really liked Civ IV.

But I do think you are dead wrong on this one. The AI is really pretty horrible and a big problem.

I am not a power gamer - I do not play often enough or care enough to be a huge min/maxer, build order, master strategist type. But the AI is terrible, even for me.

Yes, I could play it on Emperor or something, but I shouldn’t have to. I’m not suggesting that an AI without advantages should be able to beat me 90% of the time, but it should at least be somewhat credible. As it is, I haven’t lost or even come close to losing a game on the even level or the next one higher (and read what I said above about my evaluation of my own abilities).

4613

I’m no Civ grognard, and my opinions about Civ V are pretty much worthless due to lack of time spent with it. I have a really hard time taking seriously a complaint that applies to the last ten seconds of a ten+ hour long game, however.

4614

I had to laugh at that a bit also. Still the Civ line has long tradition about adding fun player rewards, the palace, wonder movies, advisers, replays, Dan Quayle ratings, space ship movies and then removing in the next iteration only to bring them back later. Still there is pretty much a complete lack of rewards in Civ V, and I enjoyed looking at the replays which is why I only laughed a bit :).

4615

Dan Quayle is still there, though.

I’m with Chris in this debate. I don’t think everything that guy wrote is wrong (although I have a hard time taking anybody using animated smileys in a post mortem seriously) and I even agree with some points - the thing is that stuff he (and Jpinard) considers huge disasters in his optimal starter build Emperor game doesn’t really make such a huge impact in my “hey look, I’m building an empire”-Prince game.

I agree that adding bonusses is more fun than nerfing stuff, but in the same piece he talks about how broken the game is because of random chance (city states, lack of iron, natural wonders), which to me shows that he’s a competitive player more interested in balanced games, multiplayer and leaderboards… stuff that I have absolutely no interest in.

I probably agree the most with complaints about global happiness - but it’s not true that individual cities don’t matter. Some buildings and some wonders need certain tiles nearby to be built and as he writes, you’re penalized for just building every building in every city.

Civilization is to me a huge sprawling single player game and while V streamlined a lot of stuff, I’m glad randomness is still a part.

There’s plenty of room for improvement and I’d love more diplomatic options and a more devious AI. And one that doesn’t stupidly sacrifice units. But even with it’s fault, I prefer the new combat system to the old stack of doom.

4616

Your evaluation is too modest. While playing a game on Prince to test my mod that raises the minimum city distance, I actually lost to Alexander who was pursuing a very efficient strategy of bribing city states for a UN victory while I didn’t have the funds to counter him. Yes, the AI is not as dangerous as in Civ4 but I can still lose sometimes on Prince, and pretty regularly on King.

I admit that I’m usually trying to build a grand civilization rather than win the game, but I would think that’s not unusual among the Civ audience. If you’re playing to win from turn one then I suppose the AI is not much of a challenge. Just playing to win strikes me as an uninteresting way to play any Civ game, though. It’s not Advance Wars or chess, after all; there’s a strong component of exploration and construction for its own sake. The AI is a good enough foil for that.

4617

And yours it too forgiving. You’re conveniently overlooking the fact that the AI in Civ V doesn’t understand the cornerstone of the game’s design: tactical combat. As I’ve said elsewhere, that’s like making a shooter where the AI can’t aim or a driving game where the AI can’t steer. There’s no excuse for it and people who try to justify or overlook it are doing the genre a horrible disservice, whether they’re talking about something by Firaxis, Creative Assembly, or Vic Davis.

One of the weakest responses to this criticism of Civ V is “Well, the AI in Civ IV was weak, too!” (I’m not saying this is your response, Chris, but I’ve read it frequently and I’m pretty sure some folks have said it in this thread). But there’s absolutely no equivalence between the Civ V and Civ IV AIs. The Civ IV AI understood a cornerstone of that game’s design, which was combined arms, and that’s why “stacks of doom”, as some of you call them, is a viable way to play. But when Civ V went to its fiddly tactical mode, it could no longer get away with the AI brute forcing its way through combat. The AI failed the game’s design.

(BTW, I’m wondering whether people who gripes about stacks of doom understand how arty works in Civ IV. It’s a counter to amassed units, but you have to understand the mechanics of collateral damage, and you have to think of many of your arty units as disposable.)

I’m glad some of you guys are enjoying Civ V in whatever capacity you’re enjoying it, but for a lot of us who are really interested in strategy gaming, it’s one of the most shameful things to happen to the genre in a long time.

-Tom
4618

I haven’t bothered to contribute to the Great Civ V Debate but I will say that I played the hell out of the other Civs (well, maybe not Civ III so much), despite all their flaws. Since I’ve installed Civ V, though, I have barely fiddled with it beyond the first week. It simply doesn’t grab me like Civ IV did, and still does. I’d rather play Civ IV BTS than Civ V, plain and simple. That’s pretty sad.

4619

I don’t play racing games, but I expect a racing AI is a much simpler beast to build.
And plenty of (I’d say most) shooters have lousy AI, which is why you’re gunning them down by the thousands and the singleplayer games (which is still what most players who buy shooters play) rely on heavily scripted events.
I know some shooters have competent MP bots, but the reason they’re rare is (probably) that people who want a balanced and competitive FPS experience play against other humans.

Of course this is no excuse, if the AI in Civ V fails completely at the game. But does it now? Chris just stated, that it can still beat him on Prince. I’m in the same boat, it’s hard enough for me on Prince that I’ve only played one game on King. I’d expect that there are more of us, than there is of you guys with your memorized optimal starter build (worker, scout… whatever), science slingshots and whatnot.
Sure the AI makes boneheaded mistakes sometimes… but hey, so do I.

I’d say that Civilization V is a fine empire builder game with strategic components. Plenty of room for improvement, but far from completely broken. For those used to winning Civ IV on Emperor looking for a highly competitive strategic wargame, it might be too weak. Sucks to be you, but perhaps that wasn’t the game Firaxis wanted to build.

And to be fair, does the AI in say StarCraft II offer adequate challenge to a high ranked multi player gamer?

It’s not a perfect game. It’s weaker than IV in some aspects. But shameful?

4620

Well said, Tom.

Combat AI is the heart and soul of Civ 5, but sadly it’s just not capable of understanding or acting on the tactical systems that were designed for the game. With par resources, the max-level Prince AI should at least not embarrass itself, but in fact it can’t win versus average sensible play even with double the resources and double the force.

Only at Emperor and above is the game even close to fair, and that’s just because the AI has strategic handicap benefits that make it like the US versus Grenada. And even then, Grenada has a fighting chance.